ELLE Interview: Father John Misty

We talk FaceTime, pet names and Spain's unexpected love of rock with the bearded casanova.

Nov 25, 2015 4:10am

By Laura Collins

Josh Tillman aka Father John Misty

Under his alias, Father John Misty, singer-songwriter Josh Tillman released one of 2015’s stand-out albums, I Love You, Honeybear. Dedicated to his wife, photographer Emma, each track is more romantic, emotive and grandiose than the next. He spoke to ELLE’s Culture Editor Laura Collins about the process.

When you release new music, how do you feel about critical reception - is it something that you crave, something that you’re really worried about, or something you tend to dismiss altogether?

Yeah, I mean it’s like there’s a lot of people in this culture where you know, I need a number or amount of stars to quantify my self-worth. It’s a conflict, because it feels really good, but then, your more conscious mind has all kinds of problems. You obviously can’t internalise that stuff that much or get to satisfy it, because it can really mess with your creativity, in terms of what you need to be creatively as opposed to maybe what you might be able to do to maintain that kind of cheap, easy validation.

You’ve spoken about the difficulty in sharing and performing such personal lyrics, on this album in particular. What was the process like of writing those songs, before you got to the point of sharing them with other people?

Well with writing songs, you’d probably be surprised at how much of it just looks like pacing around the room, staring blankly into the distance… But quite a few of the songs were written in real fits of passion, like real jealousy, real despair, real regret. Some of the songs I wrote, I’d write a verse, and then it was two years before I had enough experience to actually be able to finish the song. ‘When you’re smiling and astride me’- I wrote the first three verses for that song when I was really deep in the zone of infatuation, and it was a few years before when, for the lack of a better term, the real you starts to emerge, and you have to reckon with that. And I like that conversation, between those two perspectives. And those other songs like ‘Hummingbird’, those were written in like 10 minutes, it just came out truly formed, I mean I had to write that song to make sense of what I was experiencing at that moment, which was a real kind of despair, at the prospect of being seen for what you really are, and all your baggage, so to speak.

That’s an excellent answer. Well, one of the tracks, ‘True Affection’,talks about the challenges of modern romance. Are those kinds of issues something that you still deal with once you’re married?

Well, that song, it’s just kind of funny, for me. I mean, I guess in some respect there’s a little bit of angst in it, but yeah I love Facetime, I don’t know about you, do you like Facetime?

It’s very convenient I have to say.

FJM: You can just kind of stare at each other. When you’re at home, when you live with someone intimately, communication takes on many more dimensions than just language. In a lot of ways, language becomes almost like a crude tool compared to the intuition and deep intimate knowledge that you have with someone. So, I mean, I think in some respects when you are separated from someone the limitations of language manifests really quickly. Even right now, I have a hard time doing interviews over the phone, because so much of the way I like to communicate has a lot more to do with maybe what I don’t say, or your timing. A lot of the time I’ll say something I think is really funny and in person I would kind of communicate to the person that I’m joking, because a lot of the time it’s really hard to tell without some little signifier or cue, like some smirk or something like that, but over the phone you just have to be so pedantic.

Yeah, sarcasm doesn’t really translate over the phone.

You know, like I would just gently touch your arm and let you know that everything’s going to be okay.

Well on that note… there’s a real theatrical element to your work. You’re never just a guy standing there with a microphone, and your music videos are more like short films than music videos. Is that element of performance something that you’re particularly drawn to?

With film, books, there are films that are like 8 ½ versus Mission Impossible. Mission Impossible, you’re going to get this really tight, cohesive plot, and that satisfaction of seeing this thing speed towards its conclusion, and you leave feeling nothing. You know, like maybe you’re scintillated in some way. And then there’s a movie like 8 ½ that almost has no plot. At times it’s totally contradictory and totally incohesive, but it’s a beauty just to watch, you know what I mean? Like the very act of watching it… you know you’re not just sitting there waiting to see how it ends. And I think that there are ways that I perform that make a lot more sense if someone’s saying “Okay, who is this Josh Tillman person”. They want the experience of going to a show, for it to just be like going to the zoo or something… I wanna go see this Josh Tillman person in some sort of natural habitat. And that might be satisfying on some levels for consumerist culture, but what I’m trying to do at my live shows is just a lot closer to 8 ½, rather than Mission Impossible. In order to do that, there does have to be some confusion. The shows that have ever meant anything to me, I don’t leave asking these questions. I leave the show just like what the fuck did I just see. You know?

Yeah…

I guess it’s the shows that I have not enjoyed, I could tell you exactly what it was that I saw and exactly what it was that I didn’t like about it. I’m just following my instincts. I don’t have any kind of like treatise or mission statement in terms of what it is I’m trying to accomplish on stage. And also it just keeps changing, our instincts are evolving.

Well you’re coming out to play Fairgrounds Festival in Berry next weekend. What are you most looking forward to about coming back to Australia?

I like the pace, everything’s still far apart but you get a couple days off between every show. I don’t know what it is about you people but I just love coming to Australia. The audiences are some of the best in the world. The beautiful beaches, yeah.

What’s your best festival experience that you’ve had?

To be honest with you, they all kind of blend into one blurred, indistinguishable experience. I’m really racking my brain… You don’t really experience them as a festival; you’re just kind of in and out. But I’ve just played a festival in Portugal and I don’t know what’s going on in Portugal but they just love rock music. And it’s really strange because I feel like I got a reaction in Portugal as if I were Tiesto or some huge DJ, it was seriously like 30,000 people just losing their shit, like it was kind of twilight zone. I felt like it was some sort of massive practical joke or something.

Maybe Tiesto was on next, and they were all waiting out or something.

Yeah, Tiesto was actually right behind me the whole time.

Father John Misty plays Fairgrounds Festival in Berry, NSW on Saturday December 5. Tickets (including camping passes) available here.